If you're looking for an upmarket
luxury experience, then being able to get advice from an expert
that has sampled different hotels, restaurants, tours, etc, and
who can describe the different choices so as to help you choose
the best suited for you is potentially invaluable.

Thank you for your interest in helping this site to continue to develop. Some of the information we give you here can save you thousands of dollars the next time you're arranging travel, or will substantially help the quality of your travel experiences in other, non-cash ways.

Fantastic bure - or
frightful shack? Where do you turn to for advice when
choosing a 'special' travel experience?

A resource like
Passport Travel Newsletter can help.

The Passport Travel Newsletter
and its associated
website describes itself as 'America's oldest luxury travel
information source since 1965'. It has a good reputation and a
loyal following.

With an annual subscription of
$99, this is either very good value - if it truly helps you - or
very expensive if it doesn't. Which is the case? If you're
looking for upmarket travel experiences, and willing to pay top
dollar in return for best quality, the advice of a publication
such as this could be invaluable.

Each newsletter is twenty
half-letter pages (about 9500 words) in length. Twelve contain
nine mini-features on various regions, four pages are a feature
on an international destination and the other four are a feature
on a domestic destination (anywhere you can travel without
needing a passport). During the last four months, the featured
international destinations have been Bologna, Scotland, Southern
India and Vienna; while the featured local destinations have
been Oahu, Mexico City, High Country Golf and Charleston.

The nine mini-features
include sections on London, Paris and Rome every month (due to
the popularity of these destinations with readers) and other
destinations on a rotating basis to round out its coverage of
the world.

Perhaps disappointingly, the
newsletter is printed only in one color. It doesn't have any
photos in it, but is a purely text driven publication. It is not
intended as a 'coffee table' glossy magazine a la Conde Nast
Traveler, but rather as a factual reference resource.

The Website

The companion website has a
clean and appealing structure and layout - no frills or
bandwidth consuming 'eye-candy', it also embodies a 'just the
facts' approach. A limited amount of material is available for
free, the remainder is restricted to paid subscribers only.

If one starts to 'drill
down' several layers into the website structure, one discovers
that the built in navigational aids, should one wish to then
retreat back up to a more general level, are incomplete and
sometimes absent. Sure, one can always reach for the 'back'
button in one's browser, but not having these navigational
features as part of the web page design is a small oversight. No
frames or other navigational aids are used, but sensible use of
opening new windows for new pages provides some navigational
assistance.

The site contains the data
from the last twelve newsletters in online form, and then has
this information (and more from earlier newsletters) indexed by
destination so you can quickly get to exactly the information
you wish.

A 'Travel Tools' section
gives links to nine selected travel resources (such as a global
weather site, currency converter, etc), and a 'Recommended
Links' section has links to seven travel suppliers. These are
fairly sparse, and while the company says that no company ever
buys listings or recommendations from them, the descriptions in
the Links section read more like advertisements with too many
superlatives, rather than impartial statements of fact!

As with the newsletter, the
main function of the website is merely as a content delivery
system. And so, let us now turn to the content of the
newsletters and the website.

The Content - Quantity Issues

My unrealistic hope (and
possibly yours, too) was that the site would be an encyclopaedic
resource for most of the major travel regions in the world. And
so I checked several places in the US and internationally that
I'm very familiar with to see if this service had information on
my own favorite places to stay, eat at, and sightsee, and also
to see if it also had information on the tourist traps and
places to steer well clear of. The results were mixed and
sometimes disappointing.

The regional travel reports
are very brief and may not only state contentious views as if
they were facts (eg recommending not to take a Sydney harbor
cruise!) but also omit important information from the
attractions they do recommend (eg, in Sydney, people taking the
harbor bridge climb are breathalysed first - if you had a
'liquid lunch' then went to take the bridge climb, you'd be
refused).

There seems to be little
consistency in the selection of featured hotels. One would
expect to see consistency in the quality of selected properties
and of the coverage within each region. Some of the hotels are
no better than three star and do not belong on a website that
claims to provide luxury travel information; other hotels that
definitely should be included in covered cities and areas are
completely omitted. Even more puzzling is the featuring of one
hotel but the omission of its sister hotel.

Restaurant recommendations
are also far from complete. Of course, we all have our own
favorites, but I was very dismayed to see that, for example, in
Salzburg, no mention was made of the excellent
brewery/restaurant complex in the monastery on one side of the
city - a meal (and more than a few beers) there was definitely
one of the highlights of my visit to that city. I'd also have
expected the sightseeing portion of the Salzburg review to
discuss the 'Sound of Music' tour - perhaps the most popular
local tour, and definitely the biggest disappointment of my
Salzburg visit!

There are some surprising
omissions of entire cities and regions. For example, in Britain,
no mention is made of York - surely one of the prime tourism
gems. In Greece, almost none of the islands are mentioned at all
- nothing on Mykonos, or Santorini, or most of the other
islands.

The site has a section on
cruising that comprises merely one very long page of writeups,
variously of cruise lines in general, or of specific ships
and/or itineraries. Alas, nothing is dated, so there is no way
of knowing what is current and what may be out of date, and
after reading through what seem like dozens of similarly glowing
reports on different ships and companies, one is left with very
little clear guidance as to which cruise to choose.

Even the summary ends up
recommending six different cruise lines, plus adding another
five cruise lines as being 'worth consideration' - between the
eleven different cruise lines, something in excess of 90% of all
cruise ships are included in their recommendations! Hardly a
useful short list at all, and an area where most people truly
need helpful advice.

The Content - Quality Issues

Hotel reviews range from
very brief factual recitations of how many rooms, location and
contact details with no actual review or opinion at all, to more
detailed writeups on hotels. A review of one hotel (the
resplendent Grand Hotel Europe in St Petersburg, Russia) sounded
to me like the reviewer had never even walked into the hotel (he
commented on the lack of a lobby area - the lobby does exist but
is not visible from the street)!

Strangely, few of the
hotels' contact details include a website or email address, even
if the hotel has these. Reviews are generally undated so one
does not know how up to date the comments (or the quoted room
rates) may be.

There are two things I'd
love to see - first of all, some negative comments about things!
For example, I read through the hotel recommendations in Sydney
(only seven hotels listed) and there wasn't a negative critical
comment about any of these seven hotels. Are all seven perfect
in every respect? Absolutely not! Surely this service should
expose the shortcomings - luxury travelers expect the highest
standards, and by ignoring the negatives and only detailing the
positives, the service is not being completely helpful.

The other thing that would
be helpful is to rank hotels from a 'best choice' to a 'worst
choice' category, or even to assign some type of stars, or in
some other way to answer the question 'So which hotel should I
stay at?'. Using Paris as an example, the service lists 67
hotels, with reviews averaging a brief 110 words (a similar
length to this single paragraph). Almost without exception, all
hotels are given excellent reviews, and one is left with no
sense at all of what would be the 'best' or 'second best' choice
to make.

Of course the concept of
'best' varies from person to person, based on their individual
preferences, but even so, it would be very helpful for the
service to not just list a confusingly large number of hotels,
but also then to provide some 'best in category' designations to
help direct readers to what are likely to be the most
appropriate hotels.

The unanswered question in
all cases is 'if I don't see a hotel listed, is it because it is
not considered good enough, or because the service just plain
hasn't reviewed it'?

Other inconsistencies are
also present. In the Airlines section of their Travel Report
area, they provide a review of an Alaska Airlines flight, but
have no information on, for example, American, Continental,
Delta, or Jet Blue, and although they have information on Varig,
they have no information on British Airways or Lufthansa or
Virgin or Qantas or Singapore or just about any other major
international carrier. Surely a Luxury Travel Information Source
would feature a discussion on the relative merits of BA and AF
Concordes, a discussion on the new sleeper beds, and other such
things of interest to premium cabin travelers! (The newsletter
publisher advises that they strictly limit their reviews only to
airlines that they personally travel on, they do not accept
second hand reports, hence the limited, but slowly growing,
coverage.)

Summary - Should You Subscribe?

As I observed at the start,
the newsletter does have a loyal following of people that have
subscribed for a long time, and so obviously it is doing some
things very well. The monthly newsletters do provide interesting
news, either semi-indepth features or briefer overview comments,
and if you're considering traveling to a new destination for the
first time, and the destination appears in one of these
features, you might well get great value from the service. With
a typical luxury hotel costing $250 (or very much more!) a
night, and a typical luxury vacation being somewhere from mid
four figures up into five figures and above in total cost, a $99
investment in a bit of research seems very mild.

In total, in a typical year,
you'll get 72 mini articles, monthly updates on Rome, Paris and
London, plus 12 major features on other foreign destinations and
12 major features on domestic destinations. That's quite a lot
of material.

But the service doesn't make
bold and strong recommendations, and neither does it
aggressively tell you which hotels and restaurants to avoid -
surely that is as valuable and essential as giving you a partial
list of hotels/restaurants that are satisfactory!

If you travel regularly -
especially to London, Paris, and/or Rome, and feel the need for
additional ideas and suggestions, then you will probably get
value from this service. However, the service could add a great
deal more features to make it more generally useful to a wider
audience.

Satisfaction Guarantee

If you're interested in this
newsletter, why not sign up for it - they offer a full money
back guarantee. You can cancel any time during the life of your
subscription for a full refund! You can't get a fairer offer
than that.

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Originally published
26 July 2002, last update
02 Jul 2017

You may freely reproduce or distribute this article for noncommercial purposes as long as you give credit to me as original writer.